Ellie Park, Multimedia Managing Editor

The stakes of applying to American universities as an international student have increased dramatically in the past two decades. 

Administrators and international students who spoke with the News said that global outreach from Yale, as well as the introduction of need-based financial aid to international students, have resulted in higher demands for admissions to Ivy League schools. As a result, international schools across the world have leaned into their advantages of expert college counselors and similarity to the American college system.

“We are in the fortunate position of attracting an exceptionally strong pool of applicants from nearly every country in the world each cycle,” Jeremiah Quinlan, dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid, wrote to the News.

According to Richard Burston ’82, the co-chairman of the Alumni Schools Committee, or ASC, in the United Kingdom, 20 years ago, prestigious U.K. schools were more inclined to send top students to Oxford and Cambridge. 

Now, as American universities have elevated their positions across the U.K., more schools are spending resources to increase their admissions to Ivies. On a website of a top U.K. school, they display the number of students who got into Oxbridge, and they have the number of students who got into top American schools, Burston said. 

“People didn’t have the awareness of what an Ivy League education was about,” he said about the beginning of his career in the early 2000s. “They obviously didn’t have access to Yale, whereas an American student could visit the Yale campus.” 

Megan Lee ’28, who attended Wycombe Abbey, a private boarding school in the U.K., said that the flexible liberal arts system convinced her to apply to college in the U.S. In the U.K., students choose their subject combination, through which they specialize in a pool of three to four subjects, at the age of 15. Then, they apply to British universities based on their subjects.

“I applied for English literature, and I really wasn’t sure I wanted to do that for three years,” she said. “I wanted some time to explore.”

As the demand for U.S. colleges and universities increased, high schools across the world have developed admissions strategies that go beyond competitive academics. 

Andrew Lau ’26 attended Raffles Institution, a top “local school” in Singapore founded in 1823, which, in his year, sent three students to Yale and five to Harvard. He thinks part of his institution’s strength, as well as its academic rigor and high bar for admittance, had to do with his experienced, well-connected college counselor. 

“We had a really good higher education counselor who is very familiar with the process and has done it for many years,” Lau said. “She took on especially all the students who the school thought had chances to get into the Ivy League to Oxford or Cambridge.”

According to Lau, his college counselor mentioned getting dinner with admission officers, too.

Sofia Costa Franco ’28, who attended St. Paul’s School in São Paulo, Brazil, also emphasized the importance of her college counselor, who wrote all of the school’s recommendation letters based on his extensive understanding of the American college system.

“We have more access to these exams than students from Brazilian schools, and we don’t have to take language exams, unlike other Brazilian students,” Costa Franco said. “This means that there is some inequality with the application process, and in general, students from international schools tend to have it easier than students from Brazilian schools.”

Burston speculated that one of the leading causes of the increase in international interest is the more generous Ivy League financial aid policies. He explained that before Yale changed its policy to make international financial aid need-based, the average applicant would be from either an international school or a U.K. private school. 

Following the policy change, more students became aware that Yale was a “more affordable option than Oxford or Cambridge after financial aid.” 

Burston accredited organizations, such as the Sutton Trust, for “helping students from less affluent backgrounds to have opportunities to study at elite universities” and encouraging more people to apply to Yale. While 25 years ago, Yale had around 50 Yale applicants from the U.K., last year, the number was nine to 10 times that number. 

In addition to domestic efforts to increase awareness and encourage applications, American schools are also involved in global outreach. According to Keith Light, director of international admissions, the Yale admissions team partners with other American universities to give audiences an opportunity to hear about multiple U.S. institutions at once.

“Yale officers also visit schools on their own, in much the same way that officers visit high schools across the United States,” he wrote to the News. “Yale’s international admissions officers quickly become familiar with the education systems in all the countries in their assigned region.”

Fifty-five countries are represented in the class of 2028.